At the June Chicago Democratic Socialists of America chapter convention, our membership passed the resolution to “Ban Chapter AI Use and Resist AI Proliferation.” I believe this is a good step towards combating the artificial intelligence oligarchy and its destructive, unpopular data centers, as well as ensuring our members develop their skills by doing.
The most dangerous thing working-class people have is our brains. Knowing this, and that AI use has been documented to reduce brain function (“Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation
of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task”), I am concerned for the future of our class struggle if AI use proliferates further. We already have grave literacy issues in this country; in 2019, one in five adults in the United States did not have English literacy skills sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That in itself is alarming, and we as socialists should fight to promote literacy at a time when misinformation and fascist propaganda is seeping into all of our media. Discouraging members from using AI is one way to do this, but we also need to begin to explore heavily regulating or outright banning AI use in news media, social media, education, the medical field, the legal industry, government, police surveillance, and benefits assessments, especially considering the problems of false information in these fields.
Most people learn by doing in some capacity. The act of trying and failing is important for human development, and AI creates a ‘shortcut’ to learning that turns people into mere production machines. I see no reason why the chapter should use AI in any chapter activities. We have smart comrades with a wide variety of skills, and what we don’t have we can learn, recruit help with, or pay a worker to do, rather than contribute to a demand for AI that is degrading our environment at an alarming rate, much faster than other capitalist industries. I personally started participating in the chapter through helping the Lift the Ban on Rent Control campaign research donations from the real estate industry to various local elected officials and politicians, voting histories, and local housing decisions. That self-conducted research helped me develop my politics, notice new things, and recognize patterns. If I had used AI to do that research, I would have received a final ‘product’ much faster, but I would have also missed the political development and personal connections that came with asking other comrades I did not know for help, reading peripheral material I did not originally think was relevant, and seeing over and over the sheer scope of power the real estate industry has over politics in Illinois.
It is true that AI is hard to escape using any existing technology, because AI companies are infesting every aspect of society to squeeze whatever profit they can out of their investment. We do not have to accept that. We can take a page out of Lina Khan’s book and pass regulations requiring companies to have clear opt in/opt out interfaces so consumers can choose whether or not to use it. We can pass moratoriums on new data centers and encourage research into new ways to run existing ones to reduce their harm to the environment and the lives of their neighbors. We can pass regulations around intellectual property use and data-scraping by AI to avoid dead internet and protect original thoughts and cultural production. We can tax AI companies at high rates, or push for public ownership so that the people make the decisions and reap the benefits around the technology. And most importantly, when we pass these laws and regulations, we must staff regulatory agencies and empower them to go after companies and their shareholders to enforce them.
